Signal and Noise

You’ve got your data - year-over-year numbers - your lists segmented according to your target demographics... but your campaign still under-performs.

So you lower the next projection. Adjust your KPIs to reflect due diligence, best practices, and hopefully then you’ll ‘meet expectations.’

Your asked if you’ve ever heard of UPOD - under-promise, over-deliver - and you humor them while avoiding what you really want to say.

After all, you’re the professional with the letters behind your name and you’re the one who scours the file to reduce the bad addresses while knowing the zip codes that should to perform well.

And then books like Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise comes along and you realize ‘they’ don’t teach you this stuff at your conferences or classes on marketing and fundraising.

When Silver narrates how we tend to be so distracted by the noise - amassing data and histories and demographic profiles and more data but missing the signal in all that noise.

What’s more important, zip code or browser history?

Zip codes tell you so much that the professionals sell you at great expense. But browser history tells you what’s important to the end-user.

What are people reading, and why, matters so much more than constructing a single, generic profile.

But we see what we want to see - and because of historical trends, or industry standards or something a famous consultant said on Twitter - it must work.

But the signal is about probabilities and those are harder to see than all the noise.

How about a seminar... or 10 seminars... on what noise to ignore?

We’d never do that because that would mean losing a crucial data point or two.

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